halo 2

We bid farewell to Halo 2 online last week. Bummer. To make up for it (ha!) Bungie might have a wee treat instore for us:

“Of course, anyone who played, ever, will be getting some visual love once Reach rolls around, as long as the gamertag you’re currently using tallied up an online game of Halo 2. We know you want to know exactly what it is, but to be honest, we haven’t finalized the flair just yet. It won’t be something as grand as a suit of armor, but we’ll make sure that other players are able to pick you out of a lineup based upon your Halo 2 loyalty. When we hammer out some more details, we’ll get in touch to hammer them home.”

My pick is some more clothing for your XBL Avatar, kinda like the Beta Test T-shirt we’re gonna get.

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Urban Reflex was kind enough to once give me a code to the Halo 3 beta – jeez I loved that.

Now, via HBO, I’ve discovered he builds bridges for the Halo Community in more ways than one:

Check out the video and read this notes:

So back in the days of Halo 2, we had no fancy smancy ‘Forge’. This was back when men were men, and had to use their own damn ingenuinty to create anything from anything! Can I get a hoo-rah?

Anyway, my buddy n3wbster and I would always try and create things with boxes. Without a lot of success really. But on Headlong, there was one thing we must’ve done 7 or 8 times: Build a wall. We’d place it near the septagon under the bridge that lead to the sword building, mess around with it, then blast through it with the Wraith in a display of awesomeness and shower of boxes.

Two years ago (June 4th 2008 in fact, shortly after I first got my capture card) we went back on to Halo 2 with the explicit intent of recording us building the wall to show the Halo community how much time we had wasted in our lives. The raw video file itself was an hour long, which shows just how practised we had gotten at this fine art considering originally it would take us a couple of hours or so. It’s taken me two years to get around to editing this down to a watchable length, mainly because things go wrong during the construction and I was a little put off with it.

0:00: This first part shows us moving the boxes down to the floor. They key is to knock any that are up high down so you can move them around to where they need to be. So boxes inside the base, the sword room, and near the offensive spawn point all need to be pushed into the dirt area for transport. As you see in the video, you can jump a gauss warthog into the sword building to help remove the boxes there, and then drive it around to the base to get the ones nearish the beam rifle spawn.

1:30: Then we moved the boxes we’ve dropped to the stairs near the broken highway ramp with the Wraith, then using swords and gauss warthogs to push them up those stairs. Alternatively you can use the wraith to push the boxes around under the septagon, but you have to be careful as you can lose boxes that was if they all glitch together and disappear. A problem that will become evident later…

3:15: At this point we move the green bus into position at the underneath of the bridge. This acts as the base of the wall, which we’re going to pile boxes up onto. I kinda forgot how weak the bus was and shot it with the gauss cannon: not a good idea because now the surface is not flat, and the boxes don’t lay 100% perfectly on it. My bad. Next step is to push all the boxes down onto the bus and along it to fill in the gap at the end. That’s your first layer. Then it’s rinse and repeat for the second layer, being careful not to knock any boxes off of the bus.

5:52: Now our problems start to appear. Firstly, the last box is too big for the hole that we’re trying to fit it into. This could’ve been avoided by just using the smaller, slightly rounded boxes all along the top rather than the larger, pointy corner types. Also, the bus fail surely didn’t help. Because of our efforts to fit it in, one of the crates glitched out of the game, literally disappearing. This can happen if the boxes are pushing against each other too much. I remember, we had a perfect wall once, and the bus vanished, leaving a row of boxes suspended in mid air. That was amusing. Anyway, later on a second box disappears and this is when we just think “screw this”.

7:36: Awesome Wraith box smashing. It’s very satisfying to do, especially when the wall gets messed up like this one did and the frustration mounts as you try and repair it but it doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped. Look at those boxes scatter!

8:11: Just some random bits of gameplay from us messing around afterwards, including n3wbster driving the warthog over the suspended girder in the middle of the level. It was something he always used to be able to do, but we hadn’t played for a while so I bet him he couldn’t do it. I lost the bet 😦

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I haven’t put a million hours into the Halo: Reach multiplayer arm of the game yet but I’ve played enough to observe a possible information asymmetry which keen Halo 2 players should be able to work to their advantage, for the time being anyway.

People who’ve put the hours into Halo 2 maps like Ascension and Ivory Tower will be completely ‘map aware’ when the new versions come up in Reach multiplayer (being Pinnacle and Reflection). This means you can employ all the tricks you learnt in Halo 2 maps in the Reach remakes.

So on Reflection you can camp by that elevator and melee all the noobs and on Pinnacle you can keep grabbing the rockets before they figure out you have to jump off the map to get to them….

My reasoning for all of this is that while Halo 2 was popular, H3 was wayyyyy more popular so there is a whole horde of players who have never played H2 maps and think they they are the shizzle when in reality us old timers (not quite grizzled ancients) might know a thing or two yet….

Extra for Experts:

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